Lucy Gives Scarlett Johansson a Role She Can Kill: Genetic Freak

Starring Scarlett Johansson as an unwilling drug mule transformed into a kick-ass Renaissance-gal genius when the dope she's packing in her shapely innards gets her formerly unemployed medulla oblongata firing on all cylinders, Lucy is a great piece of pop junk. Even though the director, longtime Gallic deep-dish pizza purveyor Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita), is predictably wowed by his own kitschy pensées about the godhood lurking within us all, that's not the audience's headache. Taking himself seriously is just how Besson gets amped up to pile on the anchovies.

The result is a movie you probably didn't know you were craving: a cross between Awakenings and Barbarella. Named for the ur-Lucy—as in not Lucille Ball, but the evolved Ethiopian chimp whose fossilized remains make her humanity's Darwinian mom and who, you'll be glad to hear, rates a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style cameo—Besson's latest programmable female blank slate is introduced as she's being conned by her skeevy boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek) into delivering a mysterious suitcase. The recipient is the movie's inevitable Mr. Big: Korean actor Choi Min Sik, the minotaur-faced star of Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, as a zillionaire drug lord named Jang.

Interrupted by Discovery Channel clips of nature red in tooth and claw that signal a Theme is brewing, these early scenes are the only ones that require Johansson to do something resembling conventional acting, as opposed to turning on the pulchritude-plus-attitude Johansson Effect as if Niels Bohr has just invented it. Though she's not bad as Lucy the hard-luck patsy, you won't shed any tears when—a couple of woman-in-jep confrontations later—Mensa's answer to Ecstasy starts leaking into her veins and her eyes go all CGI Vegas in closeup.

By then, Morgan Freeman has turned up (come on, you were expecting Seth MacFarlane?) as renowned thinking-cap expert Professor Norman, who's first seen delivering a lecture on our untapped mental capacities at the ever-popular University of Exposition. The average homo sapien only uses about 10 percent of his or her gray matter—and Freeman's agent gets by with five, but never mind— so just think of the psychokinetic jollies we could access by tapping into our brains' leftover gigabytes, etc. To say Freeman is texting it in would insult your iPhone; he looks wearier of his own career than the Sphinx does at its latest tourist photo op, sort of like he misses the Shakespearean challenges of playing Lucius Fox in The Dark Knight. But he knows somebody's got to be in the movie besides Johansson, and also that it doesn't much matter who.

Freeman doesn't bring a lot to the party even after Johansson zooms to Paris to consult him. With her cells replicating faster than American Idol also-rans, Lucy calculates she's got all of 24 hours to live, and she could use the Prof's wisdom to make the most generous use of her limited time as Leonardo da Vinci combined with the ultimate Jeopardy! contestant combined with a one-woman SWAT team. That is, when she isn't arranging to have Jang's other drug mules nabbed at various glamorous European airports and hauled to gay Paree with the help of French cop Pierre del Rio (an entertaining Amr Waked, whose bamboozled expressions once Lucy drafts him as her male gun moll may speak for us all). Oh, and having her revenge on—how'd you guess?—Mr. Big himself.

A lot of Lucy could be wittier than it is. Chan-Wook Park, who to some extent is the template dude here, could probably have calibrated the right mix of empowerment fantasy, pseudo-science, comedy and violent kicks in his sleep, but Besson doesn't get a firm grip on his own hyperbole until something like halfway through the movie. Yet the basic idea—not just Johansson as Superwoman, but Superwoman as a doomed 21st-century cyber-Christ—is about as yummy as pulp with an arty streak gets, and even moving once the director uncorks his time-traveling hopscotch finale. The paradox is that the movie wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable if Besson was half the intellectual he thinks he is. In its peculiarly Gallic way, his instinctive commercialism has more fervor and zest—that is, more feeling—than the manufactured kind we're inured to.

All the same, it's hard to imagine Lucy working as well as it does with any other actress playing the lead. At one point, Angelina Jolie was set to star, and her confident indestructibility would likely have altered the tone a good deal. I've been known to start giggling helplessly when fellow reviewers—male, like you can't figure that out on your own—talk about Johansson's talent, because she's always at the mercy of directors who know how to use her: Woody Allen in Vicky Christina Barcelona, say, or Sofia Coppola in Lost In Translation. Otherwise, she's helpless, not that the camera doesn't dote on her anyway.

But besides giving us plenty of reasons to gaze on her with wonder—and the man does know how to photograph the feminine mystique in action, give him that—Besson's premise brings out the forlorn side of Johansson's isolation from ordinary experience. One reason she's unexpectedly convincing as an overnight brainiac who no longer has bupkus in common with the rest of us is the way the role fuses with the quiddities of her own stardom; even her inability to relate to her castmates as anything but somewhat befogged, intriguingly impatient visiting royalty is an asset. Whether she'll ever be able to play anything but gorgeous freaks again is anybody's guess—it's been a long time since she aced the part of Thora Birch's humdrum sidekick in Ghost World at age 17, and back then everybody thought Birch was the keeper. But watching Johansson's ride through the pop-culture theme park is one of the sunnier privileges of our time.

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